


breathe out like you want to live

by skylights



Series: the hand beneath your head [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, M/M, bond's side of the story, day 82930483204: still have not watched skyfall, i wish this had more angst though, or something along those lines, so yeah part two, something??, the in-between part of hurt/comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 04:31:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skylights/pseuds/skylights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What else did you do to him?” Bond asks in a conversational tone and twists the knife in a little deeper into the first man’s thigh, working it in until it scrapes against bone. “I’ve seen the injuries, so don’t think I won’t know if you’re leaving something out.”</p>
<p>“There was–“ A gasp and the man is screaming again, a high, panicked sound. Bond slaps him across the face to make him shut up.</p>
<p>“Enough of that. Answer the question.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	breathe out like you want to live

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Das Einmaleins der Vergeltung](https://archiveofourown.org/works/696278) by [eurydike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydike/pseuds/eurydike)



> Bond's side of what happens during [breathe in like you mean it](http://archiveofourown.org/works/563473). Part 2 of 3.

Bond gets a call that comes approximately twelve hours late.

“We have reason to believe that Q was compromised last night,” says the voice at the other end of the line. It’s no one that Bond knows and the fact that he cares about a detail as small as that is a frightening one indeed, Bond clamping down on it mid-thought before it spreads. “007, we’re going to need you to come in for–“

Bond doesn’t need to hear the rest of the sentence to know what they want from him so he hangs up mid-way, sitting on the side of his bed with his mobile still held loosely in his hands. Compromised. It’s an ugly word to hear at 9:30am on a sunny Tuesday morning.

This means it's a retrieval then, of secrets, and not the rescue of an agent. Hearts and hands are only worth as much as what they keep and make, after all. MI6 has no qualms with mincing their words only when it’s convenient, which makes Bond think that if he hadn't used such words himself at some point to make it to where he is today, he might still be able to find it in himself to be angry at the way things have turned out. Maybe. Instead, all he feels now is an unbearable heaviness in his chest and a hole where his heart should be. Compromised. Bond stands and the mobile is heavier than he remembered.

In MI6, compromised means _missing, presumed dead_ in the same way collateral damage means _sorry, we slaughtered your family by accident._

It's an ugly, ugly word indeed.

  


* * *

  


The briefing is blessedly short, if only because they don’t have much to work with. Security footage shows a man with the hood of his windbreaker put up against the rain and a black Vauxhall speeding away, rain blurring the plates too much for any sort of workable identification. It’s mostly close to useless on all accounts, but Bond watches the footage again and again all the same. Here, Q walking down the street with his shoulders hunched against the wind and rain. Here, the car door thrown open and Q shoved in, limbs flailing. The street is quiet again in under a minute.

“We’ve checked all cameras in the area for a vehicle fitting the description of the one in the video,” says someone from behind Bond’s back. One of Q’s protégés, if his security clearance is anything to go by. Bond finds himself hating the man purely on principle and doesn't even feel sorry for it. “Scotland Yard has two Vauxhalls with dead drivers found this morning that we can start with.”

“Cause of death similar in both cases?”

“Gunshot to the head, sir. No murder weapon found.”

_Don’t even dare think about pulling rank with my minions,_ hisses the Q in Bond’s head the moment Bond catches the honorific and Q’s voice is as clear as any mission ear-piece, the cadence of each word as clipped as the real thing. 

_But if I actually have the right to pull rank?_

Q is silent in his head after that and Bond knows it’s because he’s not too sure what Q, the actual Q, might say in return. Maybe a dry jibe at Bond’s navy background, something that sounds just on the teasing side of rude. Maybe a curt reminder over who makes the things that keep Bond coming home without a hole in the side of his head, which means that anyone within the Q-branch can call Bond anything they damn well please, thank you very much.

A thousand possible responses that can be said in a million different ways and Bond finds himself trying to remember how Q sometimes fidgets with his hands when he speaks, or how every smirk, every raised eyebrow is a wordless answer in itself. A voice in his head. A memory. 

In that moment, Bond knows that Q is neither of those things because the Q he knows is a warm body with beautiful, clever fingers, an unsolvable puzzle with intelligent eyes. Q is a sharp tongue and a soft smile that feels like the sun underground.

“007, do we have an understanding about the retrieval?” someone says and Bond says yes out of habit, even if he forgets to add _but I don’t fucking care what you want from me_.

Bond will come back with Q alive and the people who took him, dead, or Bond won’t bother coming back at all.

  


* * *

  


ANSSI over in France only contacts MI6 after three days because it takes that long for them to agree on the price of such information. The weighing of international favours against flesh and bone is a long process and Bond is sick to the marrow from the waiting. 

“We have found something that might be of interest to you,” says their representative, a tall, heavyset man with hound dog eyes and Bond feels his shoulders tighten, the straight backed chair of M’s office suddenly more uncomfortable than it was ten seconds ago. If the knowing that M must have promised ANSSI the moon and bloody stars for this information is supposed to make Bond feel better, it isn’t working in the slightest. Three days of floundering around in the dark while departments hemmed and hawed over the proper price. Three fucking days. 

“Go on, Destin,” M sighs, as if he can feel Bond’s fury from across the table.

Destin clears his throat and begins.

  


* * *

  


Two days ago. A private flight out of Chambery bound for the States. Greased hands and a loose tongue, words that were caught only because MI6 had paid for people to listen for them. 

There’s a spread of zoomed in surveillance stills from the airport and Bond has seen them long enough to commit each to memory, playing through each like a badly cut film. 

(The car pulls up to the tarmac and two men get out, dragging a third between them up the steps into the waiting plane. There is little evidence of a struggle, but the third man moves unnaturally, needing to be hauled up the steps at one point. 

Pause.

Replay:

The car pulls up the tarmac and two men get out, dragging Q between them up the steps into the waiting plane. Q does not struggle because he knows there is nowhere to run, nowhere to go from here so he goes quietly, as if in the midst of a dream. At the fourth step up the plane ramp, he loses his footing and one of his captors cuffs him across the face for it. They make it into the plane with Q’s legs dragging behind him, bumping painfully up the steps.)

One hour before his flight is due to leave, Bond gathers the photos up and feeds them into the shredder, leaving the room while the machine is still whirring.

  


* * *

  


With Felix on the inside, the CIA is marginally more cooperative than ANSSI. 

“Lost something?” Felix hasn’t changed much since Bolivia and Bond is glad of that, slipping easily into the passenger seat next to the other agent.

“Someone, more like it.”

“I’m going to go for a wild guess and say it’s someone important then, if they have to send the likes of you after him.”

For the first time in days, Bond allows himself a smile, even if this one holds no humour in it. 

“You could say that.”

Felix’s eyes are knowing when he chances a glance over at Bond who just meets him straight on, gaze coolly steady. It’s the truth and has been for a long, long time, even if Bond hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it before the Tuesday last.

“Eyes on the road, Leiter,” Bond says softly after a beat and Felix pulls them smoothly into early morning traffic.

  


* * *

  


By the time the sun has fully risen, MI6 has sent Bond the profile of yet another person they seem to have misplaced. Sanders, 47, a programmer within Q-branch. 

He’s no one that Bond has ever seen before and the man’s level of security clearance probably means that Sanders doesn’t even get to see the final, working product of whatever he codes, but they had taken him all the same. Incentive for Q, then. Bond has held guns to the heads of enough sons and daughters, wives, husbands, friends to know how these things work.

“Fuck this,” Felix all but snarls when Bond gives him Sanders’ file on top of Q’s. “MI6 can’t keep track of their own any more?”

Bond is too tired to say anything in defence and at this point in time, he isn’t even sure if he has or wants to have anything to say at all.

  


* * *

  


It takes days to establish a solid lead, Felix calling in favours from across state lines and sub-divisions while Bond shoots at shadows with growing frustration. Each day, he’s reminded of how devastatingly huge America is and Bond curses the very ground he walks on, every city that comes up empty.

“We’ll find him,” Felix tells Bond at some point. Maybe it’s when Bond is in Chicago and Felix, Atlanta, the both of them having hit another brick wall. Maybe it’s when Bond is lying in a queen sized hotel bed across the country, unable to sleep for the fourth night in a row. “We’re good at this, trust me.”

And Bond knows he’s one of best, but this is the end of one week with still no sign of Q, so where does that leave them?

  


* * *

  


ANSSI tracks down the car from the photos taken in Chambery. The body of the driver shows up sometime later, but they’re blessedly careless with this one: there's a receipt for a meal paid with someone’s debit card left crumpled in the man’s left trouser pocket. 

“You’d better be sure to bring one of them back still alive, or all of this would have come to bloody nothing,” M tells Bond via video link from London when Bond checks in for new information, one of the few rare times he’s ever done so on his own accord. “I’m giving you one more week at the most for this manhunt, nothing more. We have interests in Slovakia that need looking into and we need you there, not tearing through the Americas. Q branch is well-stocked enough to get you through anyways.” 

Bond only presses his lips into a thin line and ends the call without saying a single word. 

They’ve passed MI6’s five day average for retrievals twice over now, but as long as Bond isn’t holding Q’s dead body in his own hands, nothing is going to stop him from looking.

  


* * *

  


On the twelfth day, Bond sees Q sitting at the table across him. It’s 4am in the morning and he’s in another place, another city that’s starting to look like all the rest. 

Q has a gunshot wound right between the eyes.

“Don’t mind me,” he says as blood drips down his face in a slow trickle and Bond can only watch as Q touches a finger to wound, writes _I waited_ upside down on the table in blood so that Bond can read it from where he sits.

“I’m still looking,” is all Bond can say to this. The letters are dripping, growing longer and more misshapen by the second. “I’m still looking, give me time.”

At close to fifty-seven hours without sleep, Bond knows without a doubt that this is a hallucination, or maybe even a nightmare if he were so lucky, but none of that makes it less real. Q hasn’t blinked once since he’s appeared and his eyes strangely bright behind his glasses.

“Time,” huffs Q after he’s done writing, wearing a look of pure indignation on his face as he examines the bloodstains on his finger. There are flecks of blood on his glasses as well, stains that Bond hadn’t noticed before and now, a bruise is starting to flower on the side of his mouth. It’s decay happening in fast forward and by the time Q says “Everyone only ever wishes for more time,” there is nothing left but a withered smile.

  


* * *

  


Bond wakes up slumped over his papers with a headache pounding behind his eyes and his back hurting something awful from those few hours spent asleep on the table. 

“Got a lead, we’re heading out in ten,” Felix says as he presses a can of cold coffee into Bond’s hand, the smooth chill of metal against skin jolting, but not unwelcome. “Booked us a direct flight to New Orleans. We managed to get a name and place this time so keep those fingers crossed, we might actually find those Q people of yours this time around.”

  


* * *

  


Westwego, Louisiana. 

Population of just under 15,000. Marsh and swampland, a sticky heat in the air that makes Bond sweat under the collar of his shirt, even though Felix has the windows down. Reports from the last hour have tagged at least three, maybe four people in the house down by one of the minor canals and there’s backup on their tail if they need it.

“You think we’ve finally got it right this time around?” 

Felix stops their car a good ten minutes away and they get down to the sound of barely moving water, the dull drone of summer flies in the air. Bond’s eyes unreadable behind the shades he has on against the late morning sun, but if anyone cares to ask him later, Felix would have guessed there was a note of hope in Bond's voice.

“There’s only one way to find out.”

  


* * *

  


Q is curled on his side with his back to the wall, wearing nothing but dirty grey sweatpants hanging far too loose on his hips when Bond finds him.

“Q,” Bond says and kneels on the concrete floor. Without his glasses, Q looks so much younger than Bond remembers. “Q.” 

He has seen much more wretched things throughout his line of work, but there’s something inherently disturbing about this particular scene. Q’s chest holds a patchwork of bruises and unhealed cuts placed seemingly at random, one long gash across his torso still bleeding sluggishly when Bond cares to look a little closer. 

“Jeremy,” Q murmurs when he finally surfaces from the stupor Bond had found him in. Bond feels something cold in him twist as he watches Q tense up the moment the words leave Q’s mouth, almost like if the other man is bracing for another kick to the ribs or a new punch to the face. “It’s Jeremy, god _fucking_ dammit.”

Bond has his hand pressed against Q’s cheek before he even registers what he’s doing and oh, god, the skin against his palm is burning to touch. Beneath him, Q shivers with his eyes squeezed shut.

“Q,” Bond tries again, voice pitched softer this time around. “Q will you open your bloody eyes and look at me so I know you’re not dead?”

Apparently, Q is better at following orders when dying because Q does open his eyes then, gaze unfocused even though he still turns his head towards Bond’s voice. A hand reaches towards him and Bond is only mildly surprised that Q still has it in himself to grasp Bond by the throat, even if Q’s grip is painfully weak.

“Sorry I’m a bit late,” Bond makes himself say.

“Fuck you,” rasps Q and the reply is more of a breath than anything, the feather light pressure on Bond’s neck disappearing when Q’s hand falls away. In that moment, Bond swears he can feel his own heart stop beating.

  


* * *

  


Multiple lacerations. Blunt force trauma. A mesh-work of days-old burns that makes Q moan softly when Bond can’t work around them to carry Q out of that wretched house. Instead of a familiar, calculating intelligence, all Bond sees is a haze of sedatives staring up blankly at him when Q opens his eyes for one brief second. "I've got you," Bond tries to tell Q, but Q only struggles weakly in Bond's arms, the effort of it all pushing Q back into unconsciousness. 

“If we get that fever down in time, he’s going to be just fine,” one of Felix's men says when Bond emerges from the house with Q and Bond feels a strange rush of _something_ (reluctance, distrust, worry, anger that burns like a cigarette pressed into a palm) possess him from the inside out when he passes Q over to the waiting medics. If "just fine" means "broken in more places than one can count", then why yes, of course Q is going to be _just fine_. 

Felix's hand on his shoulder, gently directing him away, is the only thing that stops Bond from saying anything beyond "Take care of him".

  


* * *

  


“So I guess we found out," Felix says at length. They're standing just off to the side now, watching the CIA grunts cart out whatever they can find inside the house. “And just in time, too, if that Q kid is anything to go by." A pause. Felix squints up against the sun, running an estimate of how much more sunlight they have left to them and coming up with a good number. "I suppose you now have some business to take care of?”

“The CIA already have everything and everyone they want?” Bond asks by means of a reply as he tries not to have his gaze follow the ambulance carrying Q away to one of the best hospitals in the area. The CIA will cover expenses until MI6 has been notified and can send one of their black-suited accountants across the pond to settle debts, pay off the mountain of hospital bills.

Felix shrugs and consults his mobile for a moment while casually slipping Bond the keys to his car. “HQ says they’ve just pulled in one of the higher-ups of this whole clusterfuck so in that case, I highly doubt the rest–“ Here, Felix lets his gaze wander meaningfully over to where backup has left three men bound hand and foot, kneeling in the dirt, “–will be able to tell us anything we don’t already know. They aren’t going to be missed, at any rate.”

Bond allows himself a look of grim satisfaction and pockets the keys. “Much appreciated.”

“Don’t mention it. Get her back before tomorrow afternoon and we’re calling it even for that thing in Indonesia. Just _don’t_ get bloodstains on the upholstery.”

  


* * *

  


It’s late afternoon by the time everyone leaves and Bond is left with three men who have been on their knees for the better part of the past two hours. 

“We have rights, you can’t do this,” one of them says when Bond comes within shouting distance. “You can’t do this.” His voice is hoarse from the heat.

“And you can’t take a cattle brand to another man’s back, but you did that anyway, didn’t you?” Bond snaps and there is silence. The CIA has taken anything and everything they can find within the house, boxes of blood-stained evidence get stacked into the back of waiting vans. Cattle brands. A pair of glasses with broken lenses. Used syringes. Knives that have blood rusted on the edges. 

One of these Bond now throws into the ground and it lands hilt up, blade slicing neatly into the ground barely a quarter of a metre away from the nearest man. 

“Mother _fucker_ ,” one of them shouts, his voice thin and terrified. “Look, whatever it is you want, we can give it to you.” “Yeah, cash, whatever it is you want, come on man, we–“

“Be quiet.”

And all three fall silent, but not for long.

  


* * *

  


Bond makes each one of them recount what they did to both Q and Sanders, the three of them lined up on the short pier that leads down towards the marsh.

“What else did you do to him?” Bond asks in a conversational tone and twists the knife in a little deeper into the first man’s thigh, working it in until it scrapes against bone. “I’ve seen the injuries, so don’t think I won’t know if you’re leaving something out.”

“There was–“ A gasp and the man is screaming again, a high, panicked sound. Bond slaps him across the face to make him shut up.

“Enough of that. Answer the question.”

So one by one they tell him. The burns. The beatings. Sanders with a gun to his jaw. The shallow grave where they dumped the body. Cheap heroin from the boss’ own labs, diluted just enough to keep Q quiet for whenever they don’t have a use for him.

“How many times a day?”

“T-th-three shots, average.”

Bond calmly cuts through another joint.

  


* * *

  


The first man that speaks of the rapes gets a bullet in the throat and there is warm blood still gurgling out of the wound when Bond kicks the body into the water. On the way here, Felix had mentioned something about alligators in the swamps and Bond finds out first hand that Felix hadn’t been joking, the dying man’s limbs flailing for a while in the water before the real thrashing starts.

He makes the remaining two watch right until the vey end, when there is nothing left but slowly disappearing trails of red. Bond turns back to them after that.

“God, please, please don’t, please,” one of them starts to beg, a disgusting, sobbing mess with bleeding stumps for fingers. The other is lying on his side, eyes wide and terrified as he bleeds out from a deep gash in his thigh. Flashes of bone show beneath the red as he breathes.

“Please what?” Bond asks, voice as steady as it will ever be. “Please don’t hurt you? Please don’t kill you? Your manners are quite commendable, even if your requests are frankly, quite ridiculous at this point.”

Nightfall is coming soon and Bond knows he’ll have to make up his mind at some point. The Walther is a familiar weight in his hand, but it feels like doing this will only mean a waste of good bullets. Then again, Felix _had_ told him not to get the seats dirty. The knife’s hilt is a bit slippery with blood so the Walther it is, then. He imagines that Q would be pleased with the sentiment.

  


* * *

  


The momentum from each shot sends the bodies into the water. Neat and easy. Bond makes it back to the city right after rush hour.

“You’re early,” Felix says, surprised, but not unpleased when Bond gives him his ride back. The car is near spotless and Bond doesn’t mention that he had paid for it to be cleaned before dropping it off. “That Q kid of yours, he’s doing just fine, by the way. Out like a light for now, but he’ll live.”

“Good,” is all Bond says and he goes to stand under the shower for a near hour, water running red to clear, hot to cold. That night is the first night in two weeks that he sleeps for more than three hours at a stretch and when he wakes, he does so with the knowing that Q is alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Comfort next, really!


End file.
